First Professional Camcorder

I don't know anything about the specific camera in question, but yah... you'll need a firewire cable.

The camera-end of the firewire cable will be a 4-pin. The computer-side will either be 4-pin or 6-pin. (My desktop is 6; my laptop is 4) So it's handy to know which cable you need, before driving down to your local store.

Make sure your harddrive spins at 7200rpm or faster. Any slower, and you'll drop a lot of frames while importing. Ideally, import your footage to an external drive (for cheap massive storage, and to avoid having your editing software running on the same drive as the footage)

Read up on your editing software to learn how to batch-capture (as opposed to importing the entire lot of footage. Saves a tonne of space) Also, learn how to make a backup copy of the batch capture log... so if your harddrive blows up, you can simply import it again with no hassle.

I'm rambling.

Thanks for the help. I'll have to do a bit of research to find out about my computers rpm's and cable inputs. What exactly do you mean by an external hard drive?

I gave that camera a test drive in 2006. It’s a nice entry level
camera. I liked that it is shoulder mounted and the focus ring is
quite professional but it’s missing XLR inputs - which is too bad
- and the 1/6 inch CCD’s are pretty tiny.

An external hard drive is a hard drive that is not inside your
computer.

I'm looking for a professional camera myself, but am I right in thinking that this doesn't shoot in HD?

if you are going to buy a small sensor 3ccd camera, make sure it can work with the Red Rock M2. All features are secondary to depth of field control.